


spiral

by kaihire



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Gang Rape, M/M, Physical Abuse, Psychological Torture, Psychological Trauma, Rape, Sexual Assault, Sexual Assault of a Minor, Sexual Violence, Systematic Abuse, Torture, Triggers
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-10-24
Updated: 2012-12-03
Packaged: 2017-11-16 23:51:19
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,630
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/545196
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kaihire/pseuds/kaihire
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Somewhere not too far down, coddled in the bosom of his hypervigilance, Stiles knew that things could only be ok for so long. Eventually, the other shoe would drop and everything would get fucked to a degree that none of them were prepared for. It was only a matter of time, and that wasn’t just the paranoia talking. It was pure, statistical fact.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. stiles

**Author's Note:**

  * For [YanaGoya](https://archiveofourown.org/users/YanaGoya/gifts).



> Please heed tags/warnings.
> 
> This work contains just about every atrocity imaginable. 
> 
> Consider yourself warned.
> 
> Written for Yana, because this is what she asked for. Only apparently this wasn't at all what she asked for, so. Oops.

Somewhere not too far down, coddled in the bosom of his hypervigilance, Stiles knew that things could only be ok for so long. Eventually, the other shoe would drop and everything would get fucked to a degree that none of them were prepared for. It was only a matter of time, and that wasn’t just the paranoia talking. It was pure, statistical fact.

Somehow, he never believed he was important enough to be at the center of it.

It was a Wednesday.

The skies had been clear, with the first autumn chill wrapping everyone in sweaters. Cozy seasonal drinks were appearing in every coffee shop. Pumpkins decorated porches. The UPS guys went from their summer shorts to long pants. Everything was cast in shades of yellow, orange, bronze.

Stiles had an English paper on his mind and for once, there was nothing supernatural stalking Beacon Hills. He should have taken it for a sign. Things had been just a little too ok for just a little too long.

Naturally, shit hit the fan on a completely generic, otherwise insignificant day.

That was karma: biting you in the ass when you took for granted that low-grade suckiness was as bad as things were likely to get.

It was twice as insulting that they weren’t even particularly good hunters.

They just got lucky.

Luck was all it took.

The van was white, unmarked, had no windows.

When they dragged Stiles into the back, he flailed hard enough to nearly break his own ankle.

“An honest-to-God rape van? Seriously? _Seriously?!_ Are you guys even trying?”

They gagged him, after that. And then hit him in the back of the head with a tire iron which was only, like, the most overdone move ever.

Things sort of went downhill from there.

When Stiles managed to get his eyes open, his vision was blurry and one eye was half-swollen shut. His wrists were handcuffed somewhere above his head, and he’d been in that position just long enough for his hands to go numb.

Numb was good. Numb was totally good.

The world swam in and out of focus.

It was a warehouse.

Of course it was a warehouse. Abandoned warehouses were apparently all the rage with hunters who were trying to fulfill every single stereotypical movie bad-guy trope.

The floor was dirty. There were damp puddles. Rusty smears of abandoned equipment and chains littered the surfaces. The windows were smoky and cracked in places and, presumably, the whole industrial complex was somewhere sufficiently remote to make yelling for help an absolute joke.

Stiles took the liberty of passing out for a while.

In order to rescue someone, you had to not be stuck in the same mess they were in.

Stiles came to and saw movement off to his right. There was a pile of rusty chains and some sort of cage, but they were moving around. No, that wasn’t right—the cage wasn’t moving. The thing _inside_ the cage was.

“Derek..?”

Red eyes flashed an answer. The muffled sound told him they had the werewolf gagged.

Fear stirred in Stiles’ gut for the first time since they’d grabbed him.

 _Awesome._ So much for the rescue party.

They started in on Derek.

The narrow world Stiles was in filled with snarls, growls, soft noises where skin broke. A crack or two. Ribs? Maybe. Definitely an arm. Or was it a paw at this point?

Crow bar. Part of a rusty pipe. Something that looked like it had been fashioned from the jagged edge of a shattered glass jar.

The stale air hung heavy with dust and the unmistakable smell of pain: iron, blood, sweat.

“You girl scouts want to pick on someone your own size?”

In retrospect, picking a fight while completely helpless was probably not the best idea.

“Hey, that’s a compliment. Girl Scouts are really tough. Have you seen the way they bully people into buying chemical-laden cookies?”

Apparently they didn’t appreciate his sense of humor. Everyone was a critic these days.

On the up side, they stopped attempting to turn Derek into steak tartare. Or was it gaegogi, since he was a werewolf?

Either way.

The down side was that now Stiles had their undivided attention, and he was far less durable. He really should have thought that part through more thoroughly.

The first punch got him so hard that his vision swam, and the pain caught up with him a moment later. He spit blood and wondered if they were going to punch his teeth out. 

He’d always had nice teeth. Never needed braces or anything.

“Dude, come on, I don’t want to be buying Poligrip by 17.”

His voice sounded a little weaker than he would have wanted, but then they punched Stiles in the stomach a few times and the whole ‘talking’ thing was sort of replaced by the whole ‘gagging and gasping for air’ thing, which sort of took priority and made it much more difficult to be snarky.

Apparently beating the shit out of teenagers was a great way to blow off steam. Stiles floated between catatonia and excruciating, hyper-aware pain. They left his face more or less alone, so that aside from a black eye, a cut across one cheek and a split lip—but hey, who was counting—he was totally ready for class photos.

Hitting his ribs and stomach only entertained them until he threw up on the short bald one, and then they moved more to his flanks and up-strung arms.

Also kicking at his legs was apparently a thing.

His shirt got torn off at some point.

“I appreciate the concern,” Stiles croaked out, “but it’s actually sort of chilly in here.”

Alright, so that was what he _wanted_ to say. It came out more like a whimper, which was absolutely not a manly sound. Luckily, they didn’t give him too much time to worry about his quickly-disappearing sense of machismo, because the one with the moustache was a smoker and decided that the soft, tender skin of Stiles’ lower stomach made the perfect canvas for his cigarette burn art.

Stiles managed not to scream himself hoarse.

Not until they found a discarded box of tacks and started working them under his fingernails.

He must have blacked out longer that time. The sky behind the dirty windows had gone dark, and they only had a few flashlights scattered on the ground for illumination.

Stiles tried to find Derek’s red gaze, throat working convulsively as panic threatened to crawl its way out in a stuttered breath.

“Sourwolf, you still with me?”

There was a jangle of chains and a muffled noise, and that was clearly supposed to mean that yeah, Derek was there and he was totally super-close to finding a really awesome way out of this mess.

They’d taken the tacks out, at least. That was really nice of them.

“You guys must really have a soft spot for me,” Stiles said, choking on a wheeze when they shoved his arms down from whatever they’d had the handcuffs hooked to overhead. “I haven’t had this much attention since that time I fell into the river on my second-grade field trip. Which, by the way, you guys totally shouldn’t dump me into a river or anything. I mean, all that pollution, all this pretty skin, it’s just not a good combination, right?”

He tried to get his feet under him when they started to drag him across the floor, but his legs didn’t want to work right. When he struggled enough to nearly yank one of his arms out of the fat one’s grip, he got a boot in the ribs. It wasn’t even steel toe, but neither were his bones.

Stiles felt a crunch, but it was Derek who howled when Stiles tasted blood.

“This is only supposed to be a turn of phrase,” Stiles wheezed. “I mean, you guys are really just embracing every stereotype right now. I’m almost embarrassed to be a part of this.”

They had him over a barrel.

A rusty, empty barrel that had once contained something that started with “FE---“ and ended with “---TE,” if you went by what was left of the label that they had Stiles’ cheek shoved against, but that was totally not helpful. If they gave him his phone back, he could do a quick Google search and come up with the compound in no time flat. Not knowing gnawed on his mind, because that was what his mind did: sure, he was totally going to get murdered and probably poured into the barrel he was tied over, but what was _really_ important was knowing its previous contents.

Stiles’ laugh sounded kinda high to his own ears. When he lifted his gaze, he could see Derek staring back at him, his face too bloodied for Stiles to be able to make out much of his facial expression—not that he usually had one. Besides, they had a rag shoved into the werewolf’s mouth and his eyes looked unfocused enough that they must have doped him with something serious.

“We’re going to be alright,” Stiles assured him, until he saw the guy with the overabundance of personal firearms start undoing his belt.

At least he wasn’t going to die a virgin?

No, that was too fucked up even for him.

Stiles regretted not having taken up Uncle Bad Touch on the whole werewolf offer. If Erica was anything to go by, he would have totally had the sex appeal necessary to take care of his v-card ages ago.

“What, no foreplay?” he managed, glancing up at the one with all the tattoos.

Then his mouth was full of unwashed cock and that was really not an experience he’d ever expected to rush into.

The really fucked up part—and there were plenty to choose from—was that Stiles couldn’t bring himself to look at Derek anymore. He tried, at first, because the hazel eyes gave him something to use as an anchor.

Something normal. Something familiar. Tan and gold and blue and brown and green with little freckly speckles. Really pretty eyes to go with a really surly disposition and a preponderance of anger management issues.

The pocket knife they used to cut his jeans off was dull, and it took forever. It gave Stiles plenty of time to feel the cold seeping into his knees, the pain from the beating he’d received, the throbbing in his fingertips.

Derek was trying to say something, his lips pale from the pressure he was applying to the rag in his mouth. Stiles should have said something before. Something like _hey, you know that you’re really hot, right?_ Or maybe: _I have a masochistic crush on you because you’re an emotionally-constipated asshole and I’m apparently into that._ Or even just something along the lines of _wanna help me decide once and for all if I’m bisexual?_

There was never a right time. And Derek didn’t just have a hang-up or two—he had an entire bagful of drama that he clearly wasn’t working through very well.

And Stiles didn’t really want to get his face slammed into any other hard surfaces again, which seemed sort of a joke in retrospect.

Basically, there never seemed to be a good time to say anything or try anything or even _insinuate_ trying anything.

The really fucked up part. The really fucked up part was that when the bald guy spit down and shoved his cock unceremoniously into Stiles’ ass, all he could think was _I’m sorry._

And the sobbing noise that forced its way out of Stiles’ throat was nothing compared to the destroyed noise that Derek made, barely ten feet away.

They were nothing if not systematic.

Apparently non-stop chatter wasn’t a turn-on for any of them because someone pretty much had a cock down his throat the entire time, with a break here or there to slap his face, come on it, or—extra special—spit in it. He was sure he wasn’t ever going to get the bitter taste out of his mouth, and half the time he was choking so hard that his eyes watered and his head hurt, but it wasn’t like his participation was necessary.

Also teeth weren’t appreciated, so he got clocked upside the head for that.

He blacked out again, compliments of the concussion they’d undoubtedly gifted him with when they did the whole tire iron thing in the parking lot.

Regaining consciousness meant a different guy on each end. And that whole thing about lube being important? Very true, and these guys didn’t seem to get the memo. Stiles tried to point that out, but with someone’s balls against his chin and another set slapping into his ass with the wet, burning sensation of his own blood easing the way—and ‘easing’ was absolutely all on their end—all he could manage was a few throttled whimpers.

It wasn’t until the second guy in a row came over his ass and back that Stiles realized this wasn’t about him. Again. It would never be about him.

After the Gerard-beating-him-to-send-a-message scenario, maybe he should have picked up on it faster. He figured this was all because he’d opened his mouth to get the attention off of Derek but the sheer amount of care they were putting into smearing everything around on his skin made it clear that they were marking him.

Marking him to what, prove to Derek he couldn’t protect him? Stiles knew he wasn’t part of Derek’s little burgeoning pack. He was, in essence, inconsequential.

Derek had always made it clear that he enjoyed intimidating Stiles. There was the growling and the teeth-flashing and the constant, unending disdain, not to mention the physical roughing up that never actually _hurt_ , because Derek was somehow gentler than Erica and seemed to realize that Stiles was human.

There was the total disregard for Stiles’ privacy or personal space, or for the fact that hey, maybe he was in the middle of something and wouldn’t appreciate having a werewolf randomly show up in his bedroom while his father was home. Or ever.

But Derek got his sense of humor, even if he was too much of an asshole to ever laugh at his jokes. And ironically, Derek had become far more dependable than Scott ever since Scott had gone all hormonal over Allison.

So maybe Derek did care, sort of, in some kind of abstract way that only a brooding wall of man-angst could comprehend. Stiles was sure he could come to a conclusion regarding that, but they kicked him awake.

He wanted very badly to pass out again.

Or at least to ask why they didn’t say anything. Not one fucking word, which made it all the creepier. Something, anything. The warehouse contained nothing but the sounds of flesh, their low grunts, Derek’s constant horrifying growling and Stiles’ own choked-out breathing.

Beyond that there was only the dull, hollow dead-space sound of concrete that absorbed everything. It was stifling.

It was worse than the blood smeared down the insides of his legs.

For a moment or two, Stiles’ bruised mouth was free, and he could swallow three, four shuddering breaths that actually filled his aching lungs to capacity.

Stiles screamed.

The chains they had on Derek had links as thick around as his fingers. There was nothing to describe the sound they made when they popped, one by one.

His head swam.

There was an exchange of gunfire. 

Screaming, but most of it wasn’t his own.

And a raw, overpowering roar that made Stiles feel like his chest was going to vibrate apart from the reverberations it caused through his personal rusty barrel.

Had he passed out again?

Wet noises.

Crunching, and a few keening whimpers.

Stiles’ eyes met Derek’s red glare, and the werewolf’s muzzle was smeared with crimson. Beneath him, one of the hunters was still moving as Derek leaned down and burrowed his muzzle up through the man’s torn chest wall.

Bubbles of blood formed at the corners of the hunter’s mouth.

When Derek surfaced, he had the man’s trachea between his teeth, and Stiles was pretty sure that was a tongue on the end of it, somehow.

He vomited nothing but bile and semen, and most of it all over himself, because he was awesome like that.

Cold air.

Everything hurt, and there were teeth in his skin and fur somewhere. Maybe everywhere.

His heels were dragging on the ground, and his cell phone was vibrating in his pocket. When Stiles lifted his broken hands to try ineffectually clutching into the slickblack fur of Derek’s ruff, he came away with still-warm blood and part of an ear.

So there was that.

And the world went back.


	2. derek

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> But Stiles was his.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Derek's POV.
> 
> Same warnings apply, with a dash of possessiveness thrown in, to boot.
> 
> I would say it's not as graphic, but I don't like to lie.
> 
> I'm so sorry.
> 
> (As always, thank you for everyone who has taken the time to leave kudos/comments/sent me asks on Tumblr. It means the world to me, it truly does.)

Derek liked October, insomuch as he let himself like any month.

All of the obnoxious back-to-school ads were gone, squealing children at bus stops had transitioned from bubbling, painfully-loud excitement to resignation, and the wet, raw smell of fallen leaves stirred things in a part of his psyche that was purely instinctual. Autumn was a time of warm sweaters, hearty food, and nesting.

It was also the start of two seasons in which you were meant to cleave close to your family: Hallowe’en, when you helped your little cousins with their superhero costumes; Thanksgiving, where the clan was torn between arguing about who had the best turkey recipe and questioning the validity of a holiday whose basis was genocide; Winter Solstice, when the werewolves ran wild through the icy woods, baying at the frozen sky; and what Laura had called ChristmaHannuka, filled with lights, presents, food, and evergreen boughs but startlingly few religious overtones beyond the fact that some of them were Christian and some of them were Jewish, because it was all just an excuse to gather together.

Except all that was in the past, and instead of coming home to a house heated to nearly tropical levels and filled with whatever spiced goodies dad was conjuring up in the kitchen, Derek only had the barren, drafty shell of his memories left.

Derek was in the annual process of creating excuses not to spend time at the Hale house. Some of them were even more-or-less valid. With his pack of minors tucked safely back in school during the day, then wrapped up in sports and studying afterwards, the territory patrols they’d been doing over the summer months all fell back on their Alpha. Peter, for his part, was mostly staying out of the way, and Derek didn’t actually trust him enough to bring him along.

Being out in the woods on foot, or coasting around on back roads in his sister’s Camaro, Derek managed to stay away from introspection. There was always a scent or sound to follow, a subtle warning to post up that only another werewolf would understand, a stranger passing through town to keep an eye on. Beacon Hills wasn’t precisely a hotbed of traffic, transience, or mysterious occurrences (despite what recent events might lead one to believe), but Derek preferred to be safe than sorry.

It was only once he ran out of things to do that Derek would drag himself home, exhausted and hoping to be able to find solace in sleep. But the stress of being Alpha weight heavily on him, and Derek rarely felt rested. The smell of charred wood consumed his senses and, not infrequently, he’d wake before dawn with the absolute certainty that he’d caught the faint whiff of someone whose ashes still clung to the remaining walls. 

It was like any other Wednesday, a week before the Hunter’s Moon. Half-way between the new moon and the full was a pretty good time for werewolves. Energy was up, but not irritatingly so, and there was a particular clarity of focus, a positive take on things that made even the shitty, daily grind seem a little bit better.

Derek was finishing his rounds when he saw a dirty white van roll down a rarely-used side street. Nothing stood out about it except for how little stood out about it: it was almost _too_ nondescript, a carefully-constructed nonentity for one’s eyes to simply skip over. With nothing better to do, Derek opted to investigate, following the van with less stealth than he normally opted for. He suspected that the van contained nothing more nefarious than some tweakers looking for a bit of privacy, but instead of taking the turn-off for the game preserve, the van trundled on towards one of the abandoned steel foundries that had long since been decommissioned. A forlorn “For Sale” sign, weathered nearly to the point of illegibility, clacked against the rusted posts where a gate used to be, and newer “No Trespassing” signs littered the dark buildings.

The van turned a corner, Derek still in slow-speed pursuit, windows open to allow all his senses to pay attention.

He never saw the man perched on top of the small security outpost, and before he heard the blow-dart whizzing in his direction it was already embedded in his neck.

The tranquilizer should have kept him under at least another half hour or so, but the sheer _wrong_ ness of the environment started to rouse Derek. The wet, metallic, rusty smell of the industrial site flooded his consciousness. As he lifted his head, more of the nuances started to sink in: various trace chemicals, the creak of old exhaust fan blades turning in a slow breeze, the smell and sound of people.

It was only when he tried to get up that Derek managed to get his eyes open, a startled growl building in his belly. Someone had shoved a dirty rag in his mouth, strapping it tight with electrical tape. He was kneeling, folded over his thighs by heavy, rusted chains, wrists bound tight at the small of his back. Someone had known what they were doing: without any wiggle room, there was no room to work up the force to snap the chains.

The cage they had shoved him in was only held shut by a crow bar through the loops where a padlock should have been, but he would still have to _get_ at it before he could do any damage.

Before he could get a better look around, one of the men approached him and touched the end of a live wire to the bars of his cage. Before he passed out, Derek thought it was highly amateur of them not to have gone with wolfsbane instead.

Derek smelled Stiles long before he could see him. A werewolf’s nose was one of its most sensitive organs, and it could pick out a member of its pack even at a great distance or through seemingly unlikely barriers. Stiles wasn’t pack, not really, but he had that feeling of pack-family-ally that humans who hung around werewolves always seemed to emit. Derek’s nose picked him out easily, a combination of teenage boy pheromones in overdrive, less-than-pristine sneakers, familiar skin, Axe body spray (though at least he’d cut back since all the werewolves started telling him how off-putting it was—apparently one couldn’t just cut the Axe habit cold turkey), french fry grease, and fresh grass.

But above all that was fear-panic-pain and the muzzy, unnerving scent of blood. He tried to wiggle his shoulders to see if the chains had gained any give since he’d been electrocuted. There was just a hint of slip; not enough to do anything constructive with, but something—anything—to work with.

“Derek..?”

The werewolf looked up, his eyes flashing not at Stiles but at the men approaching. He made a noise, made useless by the gag, but the men weren’t coming for Stiles. They were leaving the boy alone, and Derek breathed a short-lived sigh of relief.

They were either too cowardly to drag him out of the cage or smart enough not to. Derek snarled through his gag, his irises a bright red before they even started attacking him through the bars. It wasn’t a coordinated effort. Each man simply seemed to have found a piece of industrial debris and was using it to the best of his abilities.

Derek tried to ride out the pain with pure, white-hot rage. These bastards had come into _his_ territory, threatened someone under his protection, and were poking him like an animal in a zoo. But the longer they had at it, the longer they broke bones that started to reknit almost immediately, the longer they shoved in knives that had yet to hit anything vital, the better a chance that someone in the pack would realize something was amiss. Stiles didn’t actually skip classes anywhere near as often as Scott did. All it would take would be one of them noticing and then trying to call.

He just had to buy more time.

A rib gave way with a sickening crack, and Derek could feel blood bubble up from his nose. His snarl was pathetic, but it caught in his throat as a familiar voice attempted to keep itself steady with false bravado.

“You girl scouts want to pick on someone your own size?”

_No, no, no._

Stiles was an idiot. Yeah, they could probably kill him if they tried hard enough, but they weren’t even trying. Derek would heal from all of it, but Stiles didn’t have a werewolf’s ability to patch himself back up.

They couldn’t kill Derek by accident, but Stiles?

Stiles was only human.

The worst part was having to watch. He could only throw himself helplessly against the chains, not even able to reach the bars to rattle the cage properly, as five grown men decided it was fair odds to start punching and stomping on a high school kid. Stiles was keeping himself together as best he could, and Derek felt a cold, bitter sense of pride in knowing he was trying to tough it out. Stiles never claimed to be brave, but anyone else would have been begging for mercy. The kid was smarter than that. Begging would only egg them on.

Everyone had their boundaries, though, and the cigarettes and tacks broke Stiles’ voice like it was made of spun sugar. Derek twisted harder, felt one of the chains start to slip a little. If he could only get his wrist loose—

Derek practically _felt_ the crunch when Stiles’ ribs cracked, and his howl was raw and desperate through the makeshift gag.

They shocked the cage again after that, and despite his protests, Derek blacked out. Stiles’ resigned whimper was the last thing he heard, his frightened brown eyes as they hoisted him down from the ceiling hook the last thing he saw before the world went black.

He knew this was all about him.

His own body had started making bold headway into healing his injuries, into knitting bones and riding the wave of adrenaline to speed up every metabolic pathway. Stiles’, on the other hand, was being systematically broken down. _Stiles_ was being broken down. They were all over him, _in_ him, and every muscle in Derek’s body wanted to burst free. He half-shifted twice, three times, and each time they electrocuted him again until one of them finally blew enough wolfsbane dust in his face that he forgot how to breathe.

Over the sound of his own failed breaths, he could hear Stiles’ ragged gasps and the grunts of the nameless men.

The more they tore Stiles apart, the deeper they shoved their scent into him, the more filth they smeared on his skin, the more it said about Derek as an Alpha. Marking Stiles said Derek was weak, that he couldn’t even protect a human from other humans. But more gallingly, it said Stiles was _Derek’s_ , and he wasn’t even sure they got that part wrong.

He’d never thought about Stiles like that: as his, as _his_. Derek didn’t want anyone on that level. Kate had left him so thoroughly wrecked that he didn’t think he would ever want to get tangled up in anyone’s legs, tongue, heart.

But what he felt, what he thought he didn’t feel, none of it mattered. What mattered was that they thought it was true, and they were going to kill Stiles before it was all over and somehow frame Derek for it. Why they wanted him out of the way, what their end goal was, that was for later. Right now Derek could only growl, could only throw himself at the cage, could only catch Stiles’ bruised eyes when he looked over.

Not once did Stiles utter even a non-verbal plea. Not through any of it. And Derek didn’t know if it was worse or if it was better, but every ragged sound reminded him of the contrast, of his own time with a monster, of the way she’d been all soft caresses and carefully-planned words and none of it, none of it was like this, and there he was wallowing in _that_ as a tragedy. His family had been killed, and they had died horrific, slow deaths, and Derek’s body had been left whole. Just as it was being left whole now, while once again everything that signified _anything_ significant in his life was being burned to death in front of him.

Stiles screamed. 

Whatever filter, whatever consciousness was left to Derek peeled away.

The chains had been too tight for Derek to transform; they still were.

He shifted anyway, the chains cutting deep into his muscle, bleeding too much for his body to sustain, but the werewolf didn’t feel it.

They were killing Stiles.

They had claimed Stiles and they were killing him.

Stiles was his.

Stiles was _his_.

_There was no easy way about it, not without dislocating his shoulder, both wrists, and snapping the cartilage in his right knee, but Derek was out of the cage, hackles high and eyes red, and it was the first time he had ever reached _this_ \--the first time he was on four big paws, the first time his body looked like that of the eponymous wolf rather than a warped man._

__

…did he roar?

The men—the hunters—had never seen this. He could see it in the panicked roll of their eyes, could taste it as he tore into them. They didn’t even have time to find the wolfsbane bullets, and there was no pausing to interrogate, to ask, to demand _why_.

There was only bone and blood and intestines between his teeth, the glory of finally _doing_ something soaring through him even as bullets ripped into his flank.

Normal bullets.

Normal men.

When it was done, when nothing was twitching, when everything was red, brown, white bone, yellow fat, when everything was at its most basic state, Derek shook out his fur. He understood then, understood what men feared. Understood the primal memory of a god of destruction walking among them.

An eyeball twitched involuntarily in a skull that he’d bitten clean in half. The werewolf padded over to it, relishing in the wetness of his fur, in the softness between his toes where the gore squidged up. He lifted his leg, pissed into the skull.

And then he found a patch of ribs and fat and threw himself into it, rolling about, righteous, strong, _alive_.

The sound of Stiles vomiting roused some part of him, and Derek lifted his head. Stiles’ body had gone limp over the barrel and no, no, that wouldn’t do. Stiles reeked of them, reeked of every last atrocity they’d put him through, reeked of their spit and their come and, now, their blood.

But Stiles was his. It was clear now, clearer than it had ever been when his paws had been hands and his mind supposedly more capable of complex thought.

Some bestiaries still claimed the wolf and the man were two separate beings, warring within one body. But a werewolf who’d been born, that was a different creature. There had never been a time when Derek had not been _this_ , and when _this_ had not been him. The part of him that wore a human skin was easily swayed by emotions, but could perform fine motor functions, could use a cell phone, could understand the niceties of human sentiment.

The part of him in thick black fur saw things more simply. Saw things as pack, as food, as mate, as enemy. A part had to break, a part had to let loose, and not even the loss of his family—horrifying yet distant, muted, unwitnessed—had shattered the final barrier between man and inner predator.

Derek Hale was not one thing, and the wolf was not another. They were the same.

And the wolf sneered at how much he’d overcomplicated this.

Stiles’ body was limp but not lifeless. Derek licked him slowly, lapping the gore off his face before nuzzling his short-cropped hair with a cold, black nose. Stiles didn’t stir.

No, the part of him that wore the skin of a man had been too wrapped up in his own troubles to see what was in front of him.

But now he could see.

Derek’s canines were each 5” long, his jaws finely hinged and strong enough to crush solid stone. His teeth closed with utmost gentleness over the ugly ropes, severing them one tug at a time. He had to try twice—first with a calf, then with Stiles’ shoulder—before he found a grip that was good and true.

Stiles was hurt.

Stiles was _his_.

He would keep him safe. 

He would keep him safe, because Stiles belonged to the pack, and Stiles belonged to his family, and Stiles belonged to him.

And he belonged to Stiles.

It was as simple as that.


End file.
